A Whole New Game: Economics, Politics, and the Transformation of the Business of Hockey in Canada

Hockey used to be Canada’s game. What happened? A renowned sports expert details the sellout of a sport Canada once dominated to big-money U.S. corporatization and enumerates the effects, including declining amateur participation and audience size.

Hockey is still Canada’s most popular spectator sport. Yet, many fans question how organized hockey serves the country of its origin as they watch the NHL expand ever deeper into an indifferent American south, taking the best young Canadian talent and leaving major Canadian markets in Quebec, the Maritimes and the Prairies in the cold. Minor hockey, once the pride of smaller communities, now serves as a brutal corporate feeder system for the NHL, treating underpaid teenagers like chattel, often shipping players as young as fourteen far away from their homes and families on short notice. Neil Longley contrasts the current state of the game with the way it was before the expansion era, when hockey teams were nurtured and supported at the community level, a system still practiced in much of Europe. In one of the most perceptive and authoritative analyses yet written on modern hockey history, Professor Longley finds no magic formula for putting heart and local pride back in Canada’s game, but makes a strong case for placing today’s corporate system “in a more realistic, less-Disneyfied, less sanitized, context.”

“A Whole New Game is a unique book by someone uniquely qualified to write it—A Canadian on the evolution of Canadian hockey over the last 50 years. From a central thesis—that hockey reflects the world around it—Professor Longley provides an engaging tour de force of the crucial changes in Canadian society that led to the present state of hockey in Canada. Political ideology, Quebec sovereignty, and tensions between the provinces in the West and East all played a role. Nothing is missed, from junior hockey on up to the NHL. I read very few works in a single sitting, but I couldn’t put this book down until I learned the entire story.”

“Hockey is a simple game. Put puck in net. But the business of hockey is far more complex. In A Whole New Game, Neil Longley guides us through the remarkable transformation of our game over the last half-century. It's a hockey story, but in many ways, it's also the story of Canada.”

“Canadians have long needed a look at their national game that is filtered through the prism of the vast changes in our society over the last one hundred years or so. Neil Longley has done it, looking at how hockey has changed in Canada, not necessarily for the good, in the face of French-English relations as well as economic, political and social upheaval. This is a valuable addition to the library of any serious hockey fan.”

“Riveting, revealing and well-researched. Hockey fans everywhere will want to read Neil Longley’s interlocking political, economic and social analysis of the monumental changes which have occurred to what was “Canada’s Game”. Longley pulls no punches in tackling the big issues: Quebec’s identity, western alienation, discrimination, the “exploitative nature” of junior hockey leagues, the precipitous drop in the percentage of Canadians playing in the NHL, the thirty-year Stanley Cup drought for Canadian teams, and most importantly the American business domination of what has become sports entertainment. Thought-provoking, to be sure.”

“Longley’s book explains the dismal performance of Canadian NHL clubs over the last three decades. It is a remarkable analysis of the evolution of ice hockey, through its elite junior leagues, the WHA and the NHL. It tracks the economic impact of the Americanization and globalization of hockey, meshing it with Canadian politics, as well as the sociological and cultural aspects of hockey. Longley combines useful statistics with anecdotes, recalling episodes and players that hockey fans still cherish.”